Wednesday, February 20, 2013

A Little Study...

Worked on a study - a close up of the face in order to troubleshoot some issues. The bad news is that I had a hard time achieving the "looser" painting style of the original. I blame my little palette - in respect to the size of the study - since I would quickly run out of my color mixture. I was unable to load up the brush and lay in a layer of color. Instead, I was trying to make the color stretch and that resulted in thin, smooth and blended colors and it was frustrating to have to keeping stopping to mix colors. So, note to self, when I go to work on the larger canvas, I'll have to make sure I have small containers of colors mixed (just like I did with the mural).

The good news is that with all of this painting and repainting, mixing and remixing, I figured out a skin tone mixture that I like a lot. I had always used a lot of ultramarine blue in the shadows, but for this I went heavier with more burnt umber (inspired by a documentary about Manet that I watched recently - don't know if that's what he used, but I noticed his warmer, neutral shadows).

The last thing I have to say has to do with studies and redoing a drawing or painting. I always tell my art students not to immediately write off a redo as bad or worse than the first. It will always look "different" in some way, and beginning artists often get frustrated because it does look different. Usually, when I walk away from it for a while, I come back to find that it's not as bad as I thought, and there are some things that I might like better after all. Or, I can learn something from the redo - as I did here.

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Inspiration...

"Picasso asked: Do I believe in God? Yes. When I work I feel like I am assisted by someone who leads me to do things that are greater than myself, greater than what I've done before."
- Matisse (in response to Picasso's criticism of his chapel project)